Getting and Working with Episode Data

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Before you can set a show reminder, your application must obtain information about the episode or episodes for which you are scheduling the reminder. Obtaining information can be as simple as using known episode data hard-coded into a script or application, or as complicated as implementing an episode object in your application and then querying the Guide database to populate the object's properties.

How you handle episode data depends largely on your application and on which Broadcast Architecture interfaces it calls to set show reminders. For example, if you are creating a show reminder from a temporary enhancement page, hard-coding the data into the Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) script that sets the reminder may be sufficient. This is because in this case, the application only needs to set a reminder for a specific show, the interactive show, not for shows in general.

However, if you are calling ITVViewer::SetReminder method to set a show reminder, you must pass in a pointer to an IEPGEpisode interface. (SetReminder is implemented by ITVViewer, the dispatch interface for Microsoft® WebTV® for Windows®.) Thus, your application must implement IEPGEpisode and populate that interface's property values with the data for the episode in question. This population can be done using data from the Guide database.

For more information, see the following topics: